Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday April 18, 2012 @06:17PM
from the moving-to-a-better-orbit dept.

astroengine writes "Why our planet isn't a "snowball Earth" — a dilemma called the 'faint young sun paradox' — has foxed solar and planetary scientists for decades. Since the Earth's formation, a planet covered in ice should have stifled any kind of greenhouse effect, preventing our atmosphere from warming up and maintaining water in a liquid state. Now, David Minton of Purdue University has come up with a novel solution that, by his own admission, straddles science fact and fiction. Perhaps Earth evolved closer to the Sun and through some gravitational effect, it was pushed to a higher orbit as the Sun grew hotter. But watch out, if this is true, planetary chaos awaits."

If this is the case, and the "chaos" that awaits is us migrating into a higher orbit, then whoopee, there goes us having to worry about the greenhouse effect... Oh wait... this isn't just another excuse not to curb our burning of fossil fuels is it?

If this is the case, and the "chaos" that awaits is us migrating into a higher orbit, then whoopee, there goes us having to worry about the greenhouse effect... Oh wait... this isn't just another excuse not to curb our burning of fossil fuels is it?

I of course plan to get fashionably mad into my second billion, but the recover after a bit of time in some choice facility. By that time though, I should have enough money to pay for absolutely anything, I deposited six dollars into a compound interest savings plan a week ago Tuesday.

That would make perfect sense that as the sun loses mass the planets drift further away, but the problem is that the size of the sun is driven not only by the mass, but the available fuel driving the fusion reaction inside it. The radius of the sun is maintained by the amount of energy being released in its core through fusion which pushes against the force of gravity pulling the sun together. Certain elements fuse releasing a lot of energy, others fuse releasing only a little energy - yet others fuse and take in energy from their surroundings. The tipping point is Fe (Iron), anything lighter releases energy when it is fused, anything heavier absorbs energy. While sun has converted about 100 earth masses into energy over the 4.5 billion years it has been here, it is still fusing mainly Hydrogen (lots of energy output), meaning that by the time it reaches red giant phase in about another 5.5 billion years, it will have used up a bit over another 100. The problem is that it has around 330,000 times as much as the Earth. It is losing mass through fusion, but not nearly enough to increase the orbital radius of the planets by the time it reaches the red giant phase.

Short and Long [wikipedia.org] scales aside, a billion years is at minimum 1,000 million (or a million million if you use the long scale) - both of which are orders of magnitue different to what you claim.

A substance that, when introduced into or absorbed by a living organism, causes death or injury, esp. one that kills by rapid action.

*breaths in*

That was just a bunch of CO2 I sucked in right there.

Even your argument that "everything is a poison in large quantities" is stupid, because it's not the CO2 harming you if you go in the garage and turn on the car - it's the fact you are not getting oxygen. The CO2 itself did not hurt you.

Plants also disagree with you. When you've made a plant frown how much lower can you go?

That doesn't change the fact that the CO is what kills you. As a poster further down mentioned, hemoglobin preferentially and strongly bonds to CO over oxygen causing your blood to not be able to transport oxygen leading to your death. It is extremely common to have CO2 in your lungs, as that is what we breathe out.

CO2 is toxic but only in very high concentration. And in general you will suffer from suffocation rather than "classic" poisoning. CO2 was the cause of many deaths in mining and wineries where the heavy gas could accumulate in closed low placed areas (like mine shafts and wine cellars), with people discovering too late that they're getting dizzy and fell unconscious from a lack of O2. Mainly, though, the death is due to blood being saturated by CO2, meaning that the CO2 produced by the body cannot be transported out.

CO is a completely different beast, and actually toxic in the classic sense. It prevents O2 from being transported into the cells by bonding to the same receptors that usually carry O2, which makes it a LOT more dangerous. If you want a bad analogy, think of it as the difference of you not getting any food compared to you not being able to flush your toilet. While the latter sure is unpleasant, you can usually survive it much longer.

Even your argument that "everything is a poison in large quantities" is stupid, because it's not the CO2 harming you if you go in the garage and turn on the car - it's the fact you are not getting oxygen. The CO2 itself did not hurt you.

Actually, it's not CO2 nor lack of oxygen that kills in this situation, but rather CO. As I understand it, hemoglobin bonds preferentially to CO over O2. Once a red blood cell has absorbed CO, it doesn't want to let go even when exposed to O2. This means that one can effectively suffocate even when there's plenty of O2 available to breathe.

This is why CO is sometimes used on meat. It keeps the meat bright red and healthy-looking so it will look nice on display in the grocery store. Without it, I think meat would tend more toward purple.

Sure it is, just like water going from hot steam to slightly less hot steam is still "cooling". It's all just based on concentration of H+, with "neutral" being a given concentration in pure water. "Acidification" just means that concentration is increasing.

Yeah, then there is the pre-existing CO_2 content of the ocean -- two orders of magnitude more than there is in the entire atmosphere, the fact that Ph is a log scale, the fact that the ocean buffers its Ph various ways and gradually removes CO_2 and carbon altogether, and a few other things like that. Ocean chemistry is a bit complex to be reduced to a sound bite although I'm sure it is all "settled science".

The real problem with the top article is that it is idiotic quite outside of any consideratio

Re: Your ridiculous claims.*Everything* that kills you works by disrupting something your body needs to do to live. You might as well say paralyzing venoms don't kill you, it's the lack of oxygen because your lungs aren't working. Does that mean venom isn't poison? No.

Even your argument that "everything is a poison in large quantities" is stupid, because it's not the CO2 harming you if you go in the garage and turn on the car - it's the fact you are not getting oxygen. The CO2 itself did not hurt you.

So is O2. It takes life and sunlight to constantly replenish the element back into our atmosphere. Otherwise it will just be bound up in oxidation with something else. Most of it already has been with iron. Excess O2 did not start accumulating until about 1.7 billion years ago.

That documentary had so many leaps and assumptions that it was hard to follow. Basically, it showed itself as so bias that the worship of beer seemed more important then facts; undermining the very fabricate of truth it tried to create. It makes such a leap that if it wasn't for beer, civilized society would of never been created, but the impossibility of knowing that is really never mentioned. There are more then just one thing that started civilization moving, declaring it all to revolve around beer is ri

Not sure if my sarcasm detector is broken, but when you go popping a bunch of holes in your body, pay close attention to your marrow's inability to manufacture enough new blood to keep up with gravity's demand of placing your blood all over the floor.

I think my sarcasm detector is busted, though I'm gonna post the above anyway since I put a fair amount of thought into it...

I think you missed it. I believe he was referring to the Abiogenic petroleum origin theory [wikipedia.org], which is generally discredited (and, thus, his silly example where both Mantle and Marrow start with 'M').

There is no viable alternative, By what measure, that there is already 80,000 stations selling hydrogen on every street corner for $1.22 a gallon? That you dont already have your home covered in solar?

Fools make such statements. Solar is a highly viable alternative to home energy, Even as far north as Copper harbor, MI there are off the grid homes and even state buildings that have a 5KW solar install that works even on cloudy days (that is easy to do BTW) As for cars, electric storage is coming about, and if you paid for it you could have one built that will go 300 miles on a single charge. bio-diesel, switchgrass, there are a ton of other sources of fuel for use in an Internal Combustion engine if you MUST stick with that old outdated technology.

Will it do 0-60 in 2.4 seconds and take up 3 lanes of traffic and carry 80 people? No, the canyonero gigantor truck people will have to suffer. Will it make a small 4 seater? yes it will. Even a small 4 seater 4X4 truck if you really need one because you live miles away from roads. The technology is there already, it's just most amercians are too stupid to understand it. They think they NEED 300HP and to carry 7 passengers + 40 cu FT of cargo all the time.

You dont. Just like you dont need to have 60 light bulbs in your home burning with 120Watts of light in each of them. Be realistic and suddenly alternatives start popping up everywhere.

Hell you can run a internal Combustion engine off of WOOD! Google it for some education.

Will it require americans to stop being idiots and actually learn things about daily life? yes. And if that is what you are talking about, people being required to have a solid basic education about most everything like they did in the 1800's, then that is a good thing.

none of the caravans crossing the United states, waited for AAA to change their wagon wheel.

yeah we have all this great technology but can the average person afford it? no, they cant.

we have solar here in australia. the govt provides a rebate which kind of makes it seem attractive, but the truth is that the panels will often need replacing before you've broken even on the cost.

as far as cars go, many people buy second hand cars because that's all they can afford. I suppose if people buying new cars start targetting more efficient / hybrid / greener cars then eventually the situation will change.

Uhhh..maybe you missed the story on the front page about how Asian call centers are being trained with tax dollars? [slashdot.org] You see to actually buy all this whizzbang tech, which is anything BUT cheap, you need...oh what is it called...oh yeah MONEY. That kind of thinking is why we have morons like Al Gore say "Well just raise the gas to $5+ a gallon and they'll all buy green cars or take the bus" while ignoring that in many places in the USA there simply are NO buses and the average age of a car in the USA right n

You can actually push the gas price to 5$, BUT this money has to go into the alternatives. If you just jack up the price, then yes, nothing will happen. Except that people who already have little will have even less. Because, as you identified correctly, they can neither take the (nonexistent) bus nor afford a cleaner car.

But if you, as the government, slap a 3 bucks tax on every gallon of fuel sold in the US, you can very easily use that money to either establish a bus system worth the name or (and this is

There is no viable alternative, By what measure, that there is already 80,000 stations selling hydrogen on every street corner for $1.22 a gallon?

What are you talking about, where are these 80,000 hydrogen stations? $1.22 a gallon? GALLON? Where are you getting these ridiculous numbers and units? Where can I buy a Hydrogen car right now? Maybe your thinking of Iceland but even there they do not have 80k stations nor do they sell H2 by the "gallon".

It is the consensus of 99% of climatologists that the earth isn't a snowball and therefore it is a fact that the earth has slowly moved into a higher orbit at exactly the same rate that the sun has warmed so as to maintain a climate on earth appropriate for life. The more we fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and thus heat the earth, the further the earth will move away from the sun so as to maintain an optimum climate. These "inconvenient truths" prove that there is an intelligent designer of the universe.

It is the consensus of 99% of climatologists that the earth isn't a snowball and therefore it is a fact that the earth has slowly moved into a higher orbit at exactly the same rate that the sun has warmed so as to maintain a climate on earth appropriate for life. The more we fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and thus heat the earth, the further the earth will move away from the sun so as to maintain an optimum climate. These "inconvenient truths" prove that there is an intelligent designer of the universe.

Q.E.D.

Dude, if you can get a creationist to accept enough science to admit that anthropogenic global warming is real, that miracle itself is enough to prove the existence of God.

In the game of interstellar billiards quite unusual things can happens to planets over time. Slowly moving to higher orbits is not one of them. Interacting with other high gravity masses is, whether it's a object passing through the solar system upon it's own intergalactic trajectory causing a direct change or that object impacting other high gravity masses and causing an indirect change or usual orbits of high gravity masses within a system.

For decades science has avoided catastrophic based planetary orbits, it makes for messy science but over millions of years in a much more interactive galaxy and universe than originally thought, much to the fear of us tiny rock in space dwellers, catastrophic orbital patterns are all too common.

Catastrophic orbits of course imply major life extinguishing impacts, that's were the catastrophe part comes in and of course that's why science doesn't like to think about them too much.

Although it allows the hypothesis of much simpler and more logically planetary development models and those planets out of sequence being treated as just the result of catastrophic interactions, it leaves those scientist with such a gut wrenching sense of impermanence that emotion over rules logic and far more stable convoluted models are preferred.

Lo, for the baking of the divine mealLet it be done that the goliath meatball[1]Be moved upon the table[2]At such distance that the woodfire oven[3]Provides a strong heat source to allow for the Maillard reactionTo properly crustify the goliath meatballAnd then let it be movedTo a sufficient distance, where it may Yet leave the inside full of tendernessLike the twin meatballs upon the bosom of a motherHis Noodly Appendage shall make such adjustmentsNecessary to make it so.

Ramen

[1] the goliath meatball being our planet.[2] the table, sometimes mistranslated as "the firmament", is of course, the fabric of spacetime[3] there is some disagreement among scholars about this translation, but we know from context that this is the sun

Clearly, from analysis of scripture, we can determine that the Master of the Heavenly Forkful moves or planet into a lower or higher orbit to ensure that it cooks properly.

Okay, so the fact that there was an intelligent designer and the fact that the Earth was intelligently designed are only correlations, not causation. But Occam's razor makes it reasonable for me to believe the causation, unless you can find a simpler explanatioon.

These "inconvenient truths" prove that there is an intelligent designer of the universe.

Of course they do. But who is the intelligent designer? There are quite a few candidates so far. And there's also Me. I'll give you 73 virgins in paradise and point to point fiber. In return, you just have to donate a small portion of your savings to My Bank Account.

You have hit the nail on the head. Religion is a carrot & stick approach to behavior modification, with the clever twist that they want real behavior modification in the here-and-now so your imaginary soul will get the imaginary carrot instead of the imaginary stick in your imaginary afterlife.

And when we scoff, they offer up Pascal's wager, which is like a stock broker asking you to give real money for stock in an imaginary company - think how rich you'll be if it turns out that the company actually exists!

Or, since the emphasis is usually on the stick rather than the carrot, it's like a protection racket that asks you for real money to prevent some imaginary thugs from burning down your imaginary soul's imaginary restaurant in your imaginary afterlife.

Sweet scam. If my current gig doesn't work out, I'm going to start a religion.

Space swallows. Their carrying load is higher, although they still need a little piece of string to be able to carry a planet with 2 swallows. Thei air speed velocity is irrelevant (due to the nature of space).

Basically, titanium isotope signatures from Earth and lunar samples are identical. For the giant impact theory to be correct, the impactor would have had to have the same titanium isotope mix as Earth, which seems unlikely if it originated elsewhere/when in the solar system's

Why the Giant Impactor Theory assumes a different isotope mix for the impactor?

From what I understand, they had to have rocks brought back from the Moon to actually measure their isotope mix, so my guess is that we don't accurately know the isotope mix of anything besides the Earth and the Moon. How do we know it isn't the same mix everywhere in the solar system?

There are a lot of "maybe"s out there when it comes to these science theories and discoveries, but adding a "watch out" for planetary chaos at the end is so drama-llamas. I'm not going to worry, because even if it came about, wtf can I (or anyone) do about it? Gotta live out what we got in the here and now while doing our best to observe the future--rationally, not Mayan-Calendarly.

Well, unless he's trying to be punny. Migratory planets were proposed by Immanuel Velikovsky [wikipedia.org] in, among other things, his 1950 book "Worlds in Collision" [wikipedia.org]. His ideas were picked up by James P Hogan [wikipedia.org] for his "Giants" series [wikipedia.org] and other books. (James P Hogan was notable for adapting crazy theories into interesting books in his early years, but then digressing later in life to the point where he never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.)

Ah, so here's the deal. I'm the person that this article is talking about (David Minton, professor at Purdue University). I've been reading Slashdot for a fair number of years now, though it took me a long time to sign up and comment for the first time (I've always been a lurker at heart). Because I have a soft spot for all you basement dwellers (I kid!), I'm going to give you a bit of behind the scenes regarding this article, which kind of took me by surprise, actually. This is a bit long, so TL;DR: Science sometimes happens during panicked last minute coding sessions in hotel rooms prior to delivering invited talks that were procrastinated about.

So about five years ago my graduate school advisor and I wrote what was my very first peer-reviewed paper, which was on the subject of the Faint Young Sun Paradox. The paradox goes something like this: The early Sun was fainter than it is today, so all things being equal the Earth should have spend the first half of its life frozen over. Geologists tell us it wasn't, so something wasn't equal. What was it? We investigated the idea that the Sun may have been slightly more massive (something like 2-7% more massive), and that it had to lose most of that excess mass over a few billion years, which is at odds with measurements of mass loss of Sun-like stars. So we published it, and I went on to do other things in grad school, mostly involving trying to figure out the early impact bombardment history of the solar system, which we think may have been influenced by an early period of migration of the gas giant planets.

Fast forward to a few months ago, and a fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (the place they run the Hubble from) contacted me to ask if I'd like to give a talk about my old mass-losing Sun paper at a workshop that was planned to bring together astrophysicists, geologists, climate scientists, and planetary dynamicists to talk about the Faint Young Sun problem. They wanted me to also talk about planet migration and how that might fit in to the problem. Sure, why not? Revisiting the problem would be fun! The thing is, I've just started a new faculty job, and part of my job is helping get a new planetary science group built up at Purdue, so I've been extremely busy. And, well, I procrastinated. Big time. There was always some pressing thing to do that took time away from getting ready for the workshop. So the next thing I know, it's a few days before the meeting and I still haven't really thought about the faint Sun in about five years. So I dust off my old files, start futzing around with a talk, and the next thing I know I'm on a plane to Baltimore.

Late the night before the workshop is about to start, I'm racking my brain trying to come up with something new to say. You see, I've been thinking about early solar system history, and planet formation. Migration is a big deal in those early days. It's easy to get planets to move around in young solar systems. But the Faint Young Sun problem is a problem for the Earth's mid-life, not it's adolescence. Then I remembered a paper I really liked that came out a couple of years ago by Jaques Laskar and Mickaël Gastineau. They showed that our own solar system could potentially destabilize after a few billion years of seeming-stability due to Mercury's proximity to a chaotic region. It's described briefly here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stability_of_the_Solar_System#Laskar_.26_Gastineau [wikipedia.org]

What if something like that had happened *already?* So I futzed around with an N-body gravitational dynamics code remotely from my hotel room, in my pajamas, playing around with plausible initial solar systems where Earth stared just a tad closer to the Sun, but close enough to solve the problem of being frozen over, and Venus started out as two separate planets and then went unstable after many billions of years, scattering Earth to its present location in the process. And, when I checke

During the Archean, the time period relavant to this study, tidal heating was not terribly important. The larger internal heat from radioactive decay was higher, yet still dwarfed by the energy input from the Sun in setting the surface temperature of the Earth.

No, the asteroid belt was never a planet. We receive pieces of the asteroid belt in the form of meteorites, and most of those meteorites basically reflect a well-mixed sample of the same kinds of things that the Sun is made out of (minus all the gas), which hints that they are samples of the solid component of the solar nebula that the Sun formed out of. If they were a part of a planet, the planet would have differentiated into a core and a mantle, so would not reflect the "primitive" composition of the sol

That was the subject of my 2007 paper. The problem is that the present-day mass loss rate of e Sun due to solar wind and coronal mass ejections is tiny. The Sun loses more mass do to the conversion of mass to energy in the core, and it's not enough to appreciably change the mass of the Sun over the age of the solar system. Young Sun-like stars appear to have stronger stellar winds, correlated with their higher rotation rate. But the Sun would have had to sustain orders of magnitude higher mass loss than pre

Hi, good questions. The time period relevant to this is the Archean [wikipedia.org]. The interior of the Earth was warmer back in the Archean than it is now, and there may have been more volcanic activity, but it's difficult to know what style of tectonics was operating at the surface. Very few rocks survive from that time period. Now one proposed solution to the Faint Young Sun problem was just that there was a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere. The subject of a few talks at this workshop a couple weeks ago was constraining the abundance of atmospheric CO2 from looking at the chemistry of the few rocks we have from that epoch. There were some presentation suggesting that the atmosphere contained no more than about 20x the present abundance of CO2, but you may need more like 100-1000x in order to completely solve the problem. So people have suggested things like more CH4, NH3, and also that perhaps the Earth was somewhat darker due to different styles of cloud-making and fewer continental land masses (oceans are quite dark), meaning that the surface did not reflect back as much radiation as it does now. All of these ideas are being actively debated.

Now as to the question of meteor bombardment: that was the topic of the last 1/3 of my talk at the workshop, but was not mentioned in TFA. I am on a paper coming out in a couple of weeks that is showing that the so-called Late Heavy Bombardment persisted on the Earth all throughout the Archean, rather than ending abruptly at the end of the Hadean, as was thought from looking at lunar samples. The bombardment rate, while much higher than present-day, was not so high as to likely have had any major direct effect on the climate over geologically interesting timescales (say an impact creating a 1000 km wide basin occurring every 200-500 million year during the Archean). However, there may have been indirect effects of impact bombardment that have yet to be explored, and we find that it is an interesting coincidence that bombardment rate pretty much drops off completely by the early Proterozoic, just as Earth began to show signs of having some oxygen in the atmosphere, and the first real evidence for any kind of major glaciation events (the Huronian snowball). Could somewhat elevated impact bombardment rate be a controlling factor in the warm and anoxic Archean? I don't know the answer to that, but were studying it.

That makes no sense. Early in Earth's life it was a molten ball of lava because it was just forming and it had a heavy atmosphere since volcanoes spit out green house gasses like crazy.As far as I knew early in Earth's life it was extremely hot, as even after life starting it was far far hotter then now and far too hot to have snow/ice.

One of the amazing consequences of the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theorem [math.ethz.ch] (KAM) is that the Earth orbit is stable, despite the influence of Jupiter. Stable in this context means that the orbit perturbations caused by Jupiter and the other planets don't cause the Earth orbit to move too close or too far from the Sun, causing dramatic changes of temperature. Chaos theory when gravitation is involved is not so chaotic as one could expect: the KAM theorem tells us that multi-body systems governed by gravitation law have intrinsic stability regions.

The problem is not Earth's stability, it's Mercury's. Mercury is close to a so-called secular resonance, and it's eccentricity varies more chaotically than Earth or Venus. So yes, Earth would remain bounded indefinitely as long as Mercury never attains a high enough eccentricity that it begins crossing into Venus's orbit. Once close encounters take place with Mercury, the whole inner solar system can rapidly destabilize.

Believe what you want, as long as you don't try to shove it someone else's throat and that includes kids at school, who am I to say that your bearded imaginary friend on his fluffy cloud isn't as great a buddy as my friend Harvey over here?

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

And as an afterthought, He created the sun.

And the moon to rule the night, though for some reason it spends half its time in the daytime sky.

The problem I have with a lot of people is I don't try to shove my belief in god on them

I'm not an astrophysicist, but I'll respond to the part about the amount of energy 'to push the Earth away'. It's all about conservation of momentum. If one planet moves closer to the sun, something else has to move out. Big Jupiter might move in a little by pulling a small planet like earth or Mars out a lot. No energy is 'lost'. One might even argue that energy is not even used, just passed around. To give a relatively simple example of how the motions of the planets are more complicated than the s